A campaign of chaos and surprise
It had been a campaign of sleight of hand, of redefinition, of feints and dekes
PAUL WELLS | October 16, 2008 |
Winning a second time is never quite as good as winning the first. Stephen Harper didn't look as happy or as young on election night as he did on that other night, not three years ago but already so distant. Even now, nothing comes without effort to Harper. But it had come and he would take it.
"Tonight, Canadians have voted to move our country forward and they have done so with confidence in the future," Stephen Harper told hundreds of supporters at the Telus Convention Centre in Calgary. And already it was hard for a listener to hang on to any feeling of magic.
Confidence in the future? Was that what this was all about? Because Harper had spent millions of dollars, starting long before this campaign ever began, urging Canadians toward a consummate lack of confidence in his opponents or their policies. He had closed the deal, in the campaign's final weekend, with ads whose script included the words "unnerved," "worries," "can't afford" and "risk." He had warned Canadians against recession, budget shortfalls, higher prices and a national-unity crisis. So now apparently a vote against a land of dragons was a vote of confidence in the future.
It had been that kind of campaign, a campaign of sleight of hand, of redefinition, of feints and dekes. It had begun with a fixed election-date law that fixed nothing, a series of negotiations at 24 Sussex in which nothing was negotiated, a request to a Governor General who couldn't say no. It had led to a campaign in which words would often seem to matter more than the plain meaning of words, when verb tenses would prove treacherous, when some words seemed to come from nowhere and others from Australia. Just about everyone would accuse somebody else of lacking a plan. Just about everyone, discovering his plan was lacking, would be forced to improvise before it was all over.
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Now Stephen Harper had come out on top. It is an accomplishment not to be dismissed. Liberals who expected a tidy 18 months in the penalty box when he was first elected realized they had another think coming and plenty of time to think it. Quebec commentators who had spent weeks explaining his failure in Quebec were startled to learn his share of the vote there had gone up, though not his share of the seats. At the end of August his main opponent, Stéphane Dion, had returned from a fishing trip bragging that he would choose the timing of the election. Harper had already worked hard to take away Dion's credibility, his dignity and his ability to pay the party bills. Now he took away Dion's control over timing. And on this Tuesday night less than two months after Harper had even begun hinting that an election might be his doing and no one else's, the Liberals were weakened, rocked, perhaps not broken but probably close to broke.
"I love my country more than ever," Dion told a crowd in Montreal. "Canadians asked me to be the Opposition leader and I accept this responsibility with honour." False bravado? No. His face was unfathomably sad as he spoke. He was not fooling anyone, not even himself this time. The decision about his future lay before him, not behind.
This election had produced many gains and left very few of its protagonists feeling like winners. Under Elizabeth May the Green party vote grew larger than it ever had before. Not high enough to win a seat, including hers. And her constant musing about whether Green supporters should even vote Green had left a lot of anger among her party members. She was tired of having to explain herself to reporters, but now the reckoning would come from much closer to home.
The other parties had spent the summer circling over the Bloc Québécois like vultures. Harper and Dion and even the NDP's Jack Layton had planned to make gains at Duceppe's expense. In the end the Bloc had largely held its own. But there was no triumph in Duceppe's voice as he sought ways to express his sovereigntist fervour without saying the words that would make it plain. "Quebecers did not vote for sovereignty tonight, but they did vote for a sovereigntist party," he said. It would somehow have been more accurate if flipped around: they had voted for a sovereigntist party but not for sovereignty. This renewed support from Quebecers was more renewal than support. Like Harper, Duceppe could not seriously claim to have benefited from anyone's confidence in the future. Unlike Harper he didn't even try.
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